Just a few weeks ago, some 50 Kashmiri women came together to demand that police reinvestigate a well-known case of mass rape. The women—teachers, students, journalists, human rights workers, lawyers, and other professionals—filed a public interest litigation case before India’s Jammu and Kashmir high court. The alleged set of crimes, known as the Kunan Poshpora case, happened more than 20 years ago, on February 23, 1991, when armed forces allegedly raped at least 32 teenaged, adult, and elderly women.

Prakash Samaga, TNN | May 21, 2013, 09.25 AM IST

UDUPI: The rising mercury level has led to the drying up of water storage at Baje dam built across Swarna, a source of drinking water for people in 35 wards in the CMC limits. Depletion of water level in most of the wells in rural areas of the district has left the residents anxious about possible water shortage in the district.

SRINAGAR, May 18 2013 (IPS) - Aadil Khan and his two siblings had been playing as usual behind their house in the village of Diver, 110 kilometres north of Kashmir’s capital, Srinagar, when they came across what they thought was a “plaything” laying on the ground. But no sooner had they picked the object up than it literally shattered their innocent lives into pieces.

Some deaths have been reported in Bangladesh, where over a million people were evacuated. The caution was justified: in 1970, Cyclone Bhola killed some 400,000 people, in 2007, Cyclone Sidr killed nearly 4,000.

In the last 23 years, global mortality rates have decreased by 47 percent. With funding from international governments and non-governmental organizations, developing countries across the globe have received unprecedented aid in the form of education and healthcare support to decrease mortality rates.

As Tropical Cyclone Mahasen travels north-east through the Bay of Bengal, humanitarian agency World Vision is prepared to mount a relief response across vulnerable areas in Bangladesh, Myanmar, India and Sri Lanka. The cyclone’s current path anticipates landfall in Bangladesh this Friday.

The highest impact, tidal surge and rainfall predictions are predicted to hit Chittagong and Cox Bazaar areas in Bangladesh but could also threaten at least 8.2 million people, many of them children, living along the coastlines of northeast India. Myanmar and Sri Lanka.

GENEVA, 14 May 2013 - UNISDR Chief, Margareta Wahlström, today welcomed yesterday's inauguration by the Prime Minister of India, Dr. Manmohan Singh, of the country's National Platform for Disaster Risk Reduction which brings to 86, the number of such platforms around the world. These National Platforms provide important support to the implementation of the Hyogo Framework for Action, the global agreement on reducing disaster losses.

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

• Rates of malnutrition among India’s children are almost five times more than in China, and twice those in Sub-Saharan Africa.

• Too often, new mothers are adolescents. A staggering 75% of them are anemic and most on put on less weight during pregnancy than they should - 5 kilograms on average compared to the worldwide average of close to 10kgs.

TNN | May 12, 2013, 11.12 PM IST

VADODARA: The Socialist Unity Centre of India (SUCI) has demanded that Gujarat be declared drought affected and has urged Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to visit the drought-affected areas of Gujarat.

In its memorandum to the PM, SUCI has said that while the Central government has identified 10,000 villages out of 18,000 villages of Gujarat in 17 districts as drought prone, the Gujarat government has declared only 4,000 villages of ten districts as scarcity-hit areas.